Image: a poster I walk past in various places several times per day at the moment.
Goal performance
The big focus of the week was the content design project I’ve been working on. It was a pretty intense week, but we got all the content completed and signed off. The client was amazingly responsive as we tied up loose ends and made final tweaks. It felt like it flowed really nicely.
The project had been lagging a little behind, but we ended up finishing slightly ahead of schedule. We also used almost exactly the amount of time I’d allocated for the work, too. My estimate was 120 hours, and we used 110. Estimation can be so tricky, and can really mess up profitability, so I’m feeling pretty smug.
Blockers
I had one afternoon where I couldn’t focus, so I ended up catching up on some reading, including:
- Decolonial evaluation: centring communities and shifting power, Dawn Kofie
- Don’t waste time correcting misinformation. Instead, try the “bypassing technique”, Jonny Thompson
- Bridging cultures in content design, Thomas Chan
- We need to rewild the internet, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon
Learnings
One learning from the project I completed was the importance of pacing and covering one point at a time.
The subject matter for the project is fascinating and the message is incredibly urgent. But the information people need about the topic is complex and comes from academic sources. Finding ways to translate the subject matter expertise into something clear has been really tough. When concepts are complicated, there’s a tendency for sentences to be long. The issue is trying to link too many ideas together. Remembering to make points one at a time helps a lot.
It also got me thinking about reading level assessments and how unhelpful they can be sometimes. If you run the content we created through Hemingway or something else like it, it will get a big red flag. But one of the main reasons for this is that the content has to use quite a few long, polysyllabic words. They’re an essential part of the subject matter, and totally appropriate for the specialist audience. (Plus, we define them in simple terms the first time we use them.)
I recommend tools like Hemingway a lot. They’re great at flagging long sentences, passive voice, filler words, etc. But the reading age side of things is a pretty blunt tool. Caroline Jarrett and Janice ‘Ginny’ Redish explain this brilliantly in this article: Readability formulas: 7 reasons to avoid them and what to do instead. Sometimes chasing that green highlight validation is pointless, and ends up making the content worse.
Next steps
This week I’m working on:
- A sprint kick-off meeting, and then getting the sprint moving. It’s the first one in the project, so the momentum is key.
- A kick-off meeting and desk research for a new project.
- Writing the next edition of 10 Things
- Pulling together some guidelines and lessons learned to wrap up the content design project
